


It Couldn't Wash The Echoes Out

by cerie



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Carentan, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-02
Updated: 2011-07-02
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:22:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie/pseuds/cerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU for Carentan.  Helen doesn't solve the puzzle in time and she and Will go through the night together.  Major character death, Helen/Will relationship.  Written for Technosage's "Almost Getting Caught" challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Couldn't Wash The Echoes Out

After the first few weeks, there’s a rhythm. The sun always shines in Carentan and Helen has learned just to cover the windows with thread-bare curtains and try to keep something resembling a Circadian rhythm. In all honesty, she probably sleeps better here than she ever did in Old City but she suspects that’s because she knows, deep down, that she won’t be solving this problem overnight.

She knows, if left to her own devices, she’d work night and day and be ceaseless in her efforts to crack the puzzle of the time bubble. She’s not left to her own devices, though, and Carentan only functions when every able-bodied person does their share. She’s learned how to milk a cow with Ravi, only to discover she doesn’t care for it and she’s not very good at it. Bess certainly didn’t seem impressed with her technique.

She re-learns how to knit and sew and sometimes in the evenings, she has a pile of mending on her lap while Will reads. They’ve been trading it in shifts, reading everything ever written or produced in Carentan, and while he can only make it through the English and a smattering of French, sometimes she likes to hear him read to her instead of making out the words silently. Sometimes, when she closes her eyes and his voice washes over her, she can pretend she’s home again.

***

There’s a shift in the weather after about two months and the air is crisper, colder. It’s harvest time in Carentan and this is the biggest harvest of all because it’s the last before the dark closes over them. Helen wants to be home before the dark comes because she doesn’t know which of her new friends will disappear when the sun dips behind the horizon for three years. She doesn’t want to know which of them won’t survive.

She pushes those thoughts out of her head, though, because Will’s leaning over her with a cheeky grin that just reminds her of Iceland and begging to tour the fjords. His hair is wild, wilder than usual when it’s been kicked up by the autumn wind, and his teeth glint slightly in the weakening sunlight. She grins back, a mirror of his, and tries to parse what he’s asking her. There’s apples, too many to dry out and store for the long night to come, and there’s going to be a little festival while they press them into cider. He wants her to go with him.

She waves it off and tells him Josie might be a better choice but Will just gives her a quizzical look and tugs her along to the center of town where it’s a big to do. There’s nothing else to celebrate in Carentan this close to the night and Helen’s tired of delivering babies and watching the mothers weep and know her child probably won’t live to see its first birthday. She tries not to think too much about it, not when the wind’s whipping around them and the air smells like fresh apples.

Will goes off to talk to Ravi and Anna and Helen decides to settle on one of the benches and just watch. Observation isn’t usually her thing, more James or Will, but it’s nice to sit and people-watch while the others are celebrating. There’s a little more food than there would normally be on account of the special occasion but she still eats lightly. She’s always hungry these days, always taking half-rations so that the children can have more because she knows she can push her body to the breaking point and it will always snap back to serve her in a time of crisis. The sharp gnaw that was so keen in those early days becomes just one more thing she can push aside.

Will catches her while she’s moody and pensive and that laugh’s back in his eyes again, coupled with a good deal of alcohol. It makes him lighter, more like the Will from before Carentan, and he tugs her to her feet. There’s dancing now that everyone’s had the chance to loosen up and he grins and cants his head back to the makeshift dance floor.

“I see your feet itching. C’mon, Magnus. Just one dance? Please?”

She laughs in spite of herself and nods, wind picking up her loose curls again and blowing them all around her face. The earth seems to stop moving for a moment when Will catches one and tucks it back behind her ear, fingers brushing against the soft skin of her cheek while he does so. It’s such a simple gesture, really, but it only serves to prove to Helen just how long it’s been since she’s shown physical affection.

“I suppose I can concede to _one_ dance, Will. Do you even know the steps?” He shakes his head and pulls her close, one hand at the small of her back and the other up against her cheek. It’s soft, when he says it, but it’s not so soft that she can’t make out the words.

“If we…” _never go home again_ , her mind fills in and she presses her lips together, waiting on what he’s going to say. “Josie asked me for a baby. At first, I thought I said no because of Abby but I realized that Abby’s my past. There’s a pretty good chance I’m going to die before I ever get to see her again. It’s not okay, no, but it’s something I can live with. I told Josie no, though, and I think it was because of you.”

Helen presses her fingers against his lips and shakes her head. Everything she touches seems to twist and turn and be no longer recognizable. She doesn’t want Will to be caught in the path of that, not this time, and she refuses to let him settle for her when there’s so many others he could be happy with. If there’s one thing she knows for certain, it’s that she’s never been one to make someone happy.

“We’re not discussing it now, Will. We’re going home again. You’ll see.” His eyes are a little too bright and his smile’s stretched a little too thin but he nods and sweeps her into a complicated dance step that even Helen has to concede she doesn’t know. One of the village girls had shown it to him, Will explains, and when she spirals out from his arms and the wind catches her hair again, she thinks that it might just turn out all right.

***

It’s only three more days until the nightfall and while the most of Carentan is ready to batten down and ride it out, Helen still thinks she can stall it somehow. She’s been trying to get messages out and she hopes Kate and Declan are mobilizing as quickly as they can because she doesn’t know how long they’ll make it through the night. She’s strong, she knows, and so’s Will, but Ravi and Anna are both older and Helen fears she might lose them soon.

She’s always losing someone, it’s part of living a long life, but losing someone to the slow, agonizing death of starvation is a lot different than losing them in an accident or to old age. The day that the sun finally sets, Helen throws a book across the workbench in frustration. She and Will had tried to find a way out and when the townspeople realized it would erase _them_ , they’d raided her labs and tried to kill her. Josie had led the charge and she’d shot at her, only for Ravi to catch the bullet. Helen had been trained in field surgery in Verdun and it’s not hard to dig a bullet out of Ravi’s shoulder but she fears for infection. They’ll have to watch him, tend him. Ravi’s not terribly worried.

Helen is, though, and Will knows it. She sees him hovering over her more often than not and the few candles they’re allowed during this longest night aren’t nearly enough for her to make out the individual features of his face. She finds she knows it already, every arch, every shift of his mobile mouth, every gleam in his bright eyes. When she cries, it’s his arms that wrap around her and draw her to his bed and not hers. It’s his hands that chase the tears away and carefully, reverently tug at her clothes. It’s cold, during the night, so they’ve been sharing more often than not.

They don’t share naked, though, and while it doesn’t really come as a shock to Helen that Will’s attentions would focus on her she can’t help but think it’s just a function of where they are, just a side effect of Carentan itself. His mouth is tender against hers and draws out a keen so low and longing that Helen didn’t realize she’d been holding that inside. Love is a complicated thing, not nearly so simple as greeting cards and trite films might lead one to believe and when he moves over her to enter her, there’s a creak as the door swings in and the moment is broken. They scramble to get dressed and find it’s Ravi: the wound’s taken septic and there’s hot, angry lines streaking out from his shoulder.

Helen tends him all hours, the dark outside keeping her from any normal rhythm even though she fought to keep one in the afternoon-hours of their arrival. Ravi takes a fever and Helen cleans the wound with wine, not daring to use their precious firewood to boil as much water as she’d like. It stings and it does little good. As a last-ditch effort she packs the wound with salt and hopes for the best.

He passes after two weeks of night, lips dry and cracked and his last words that he loves them, all of them, and he doesn’t hate Helen.

***

She and Will share a bed now, naked and pressed against one another completely. They don’t try to have sex again, not after the aborted first attempt, but he holds her and whispers sweet things into her hair while she cries. She cries a lot now and while the scientist in her wants to believe it’s simply a nasty case of seasonal affective disorder Helen knows the truth. She’s buried Ravi in the cold, dark ground and he’s just the first of the deaths in the night. The others are smaller, younger, and the baby she delivered shortly after the harvest is one of the first to go.

Her sobs have finally quieted this time and Will’s hands are steadily pulling through her hair when he rolls on top of her and leans in to kiss her. She thought it was a long time coming, really, but somehow with the touch of his mouth to hers, this thing they’d been dancing around had finally become real. The door’s been bolted since Ravi’s death, their last bit of goodwill in the village gone with his passing and when Anna comes to see them, she has a special knock.

There’s no knock now, just the steady thump of his heart and the wild flutter of her own. He’s hard against her hip and Helen rocks up beneath him so he can slide against her thigh teasingly. There’s always the chance she’ll get pregnant if they actually do this and Helen doesn’t know if that’s what’s stayed his hand so far or if it’s something else entirely but the way she feels when he slides into her is indescribable. It’s not so much that it’s been a long time, though it has and he stretches her in a way that she knows will feel sore in the morning. It’s not even that she regrets it. For all her years, Helen Magnus has still held onto the belief that love is good and it’s no less evident in the hell that is Carentan’s night.

When he finishes, it’s in her, and he sucks a dark mark against the smooth skin of her right shoulder while she pets him lightly between his shoulder blades. His eyes are soft, full of emotion, and his mouth is even softer when he forms a question between those long, slow kisses that make her feel like she’s drowning with no water around her.

“Do you love me?”

She doesn’t have a chance to respond before his hand’s snaked between them and his fingers play her into an orgasm that makes her see brilliant stars, free-wheeling across a field of black.

***

Four years, three months and ten days after they stepped foot in Carentan, Helen wakes up in a hospital bed and no memory of how she got there. When she looks to her left to assess her surroundings, Will’s on the bed beside her, his own bed untouched, and he brushes a kiss against her hair before speaking to her.

“They have a million questions for you, Magnus. I told them to just let you sleep.” Her voice is soft when she murmurs her thanks and she leans against him, steadying herself with the sound of his heart once again. Her touchstone. Her guide. A herald, in a way, for all the things that she thought she was too ancient to appreciate any longer.

“I love you,” she manages, eyes startled when she hears the creak of the door swinging in. It’s just a nurse bringing them food and she relaxes against Will, content for the moment to be held so long as nobody they know walks in. That would require explanations she’s not willing to give, not now and not ever, and it’s nobody’s business but her own who she loves and doesn’t love.

“I know, Magnus. I always knew.”

When she fits her body against his again, it’s to sleep, but the tears don’t come. She wonders if she’ll ever really get past it, get past Carentan, but she knows that sometimes there’s a hint of sadness in her eyes because it’s reflected in his. And while the world keeps spinning and she keeps pushing herself to make things right in it, she realizes at some point her axis has tilted and their orbits match.

And, for once, she has no protest.


End file.
